


Into the light

by FeedMeHardy



Category: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Genre: A fluffy epilogue on a Handmaid's Tale AU the heresy, And now with a... fluffy epilogue?, F/F, Mostly book except where that becomes Inconvenient For Story Purposes which is quite often, Pregnancy, Rape/Non-con Elements, Ruthlessly unworldbuilt, The Handmaid's Tale AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:41:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26568223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeedMeHardy/pseuds/FeedMeHardy
Summary: The Handmaid's Tale AU."Marianne," she says. "My name is Marianne." Marianne. I test the shape of it in my mouth. If I tell her my name will she even remember it? If I tell her my name will she do the same?This is a Handmaid's Tale AU: there is a brief description of rape as part of the Ceremony and a resultant pregnancy.
Relationships: Héloïse/Marianne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 89





	1. Chapter 1

The sun still shines. Sometimes this surprises me. That there can still be light. After I am dressed I sit on the window seat. Look down into the garden. Watch. Wait.

My breakfast is delivered to my room. Room service. I eat my toast and think about the times I had breakfast in hotels. Before. Not many. Not enough.

The clock in the hall chimes. Often, especially at night, I think I can hear even the ticking, the house is so quiet. The swishing of the pendulum. A great big grandfather monstrosity. Doling out seconds. I walk past it on the way to the kitchen.

Lucy gives me the tokens. Her sleeves are rolled up, her arms dusted with flour. "Fresh eggs," she emphasises, "and the usual." I am not given a list. The tokens bear only pictures. They go into the pocket in my sleeve and I take the basket. Every day, or near enough, the same ritual. The usual.

I leave through the back door, winding around the house by the path. Through the garden I spend so much time watching. It has rained overnight and the smell of it mingles with the soil. The flowers are cautious still. It's only March. They might yet catch a frost. Even here in the garden, within the bounds of the house, I keep my head low, my gaze averted.

Down the main drive at the front of the house and I can see through the metal gate. A figure waits for me on the path. She, like I, wears the red dress and bonnet we are known for. She is not what I was expecting.

It is not Ofdaniel. Except it is because we are replaced seamlessly. This woman is Ofdaniel now. She is the same height as me. Her voice is gentle as she gives the greeting. I reply, grudgingly. It is not her fault something has befallen my previous companion. Whose name I never knew.

We walk down the street and turn onto the next road. It is quiet. The occasional sleek black of a Commander's car. Only a handful of others heading in our same direction.

There is a brief time we have before the first checkpoint. "What -" and I should not ask this but I am going to, "happened to her?"

Ofdaniel, this new Ofdaniel, should not answer.

But, "I don't know," she says. "I'm sorry."

She does not talk about the weather, she does not talk about the war, she does not talk at all. We pass through one checkpoint and another until there are shops and more people. People, I say, women, mostly. Women in red, like us. Women in green - the Martha's - like Lucy. The Econowives. The men, the Guardians, watching over us. The shops are as usual. My companion is sure-footed. I wonder if she came to these same shops before. Perhaps I stood near her in a queue. We would never know. Even now I have not seen her face properly.

We do not speak again until our formal farewell back at the gate. I deliver the shopping to Lucy and she tuts over the contents of the basket. I leave her to it. It must make her happy, to tut and fret and be able to blame me for national food shortages. I don't begrudge her finding what amusement she can. Then I am alone for the rest of the day to find what interest I can.

The next day Ofdaniel asks if I knew her predecessor well. Carefully, with concern for me. "No," I answer. I didn't. Perhaps I should have.

We stand in line, our heads bowed. Our identical skirts and shoes are all I see.

She should not ask. I should not reply. Already I have spoken more freely with her in two days than in the three months I accompanied the other Ofdaniel. Before me, I wonder if our two namesakes spoke with each other. If Ofdaniel before her had wanted to ask what had happened to the Ofmark before me. What would I have said?

Over the next week I observe her.

Ofdaniel is passive. She does not fluster at the checkpoint, she does not glance surreptitiously around in the shops. If I could see her face I might be able to discern more of an emotion. Is it fear? Is it obedience? Is it resignation?

Today she finally has a clue for me.

As we leave the butchers - All Flesh, we call it now - "Do you ever go to the river?" she asks.

"Yes." I don't. But she is asking a different question and I am answering it. So we turn off the main road and walk down to the riverside.

Here she opens up. I feel her steps loosen, her gait is wider. She bounces. Her head held higher, to see. She had been constricting herself in town. I am like a spy, examining her, turning her around in my hands for clues. I cannot use my hands and I can barely use my eyes so it is my mind instead.

I am not _like_ a spy. I am a spy. This is no simile. We need not be coy. I am here to spy on her and she on me. Which is why we are paired. Not for our own protection or company. To spy, to bear down on one another. I am responsible for her behaviour and she for mine. But this behaviour, her lightness, I like.

It is resistance.

There are reasons to be here, or we would not be allowed. So we pause at the church. She does not make a move to go in through the gate so I do not. We stand at the wall and look at the gravestones. I look at the willow trees. Weeping. How pious of them. How sympathetic.

The main reason to be here is to look over the water at the sheer face of the Wall. The Wall, the simplicity and banality of the word. It used to encompass a prison and I suppose it still does. Run rather differently now.

There are fresh bodies hanging there. The men have had their blood sport, had their outlet and here is the evidence. A doctor. Two Guardians. Their placards display their crimes. Or what we are led to believe are their crimes.

Ofdaniel takes a deep breath. I glance enough to see that she is looking directly at them. Thanks to the wings on our bonnets I can only see her chin, a little of her mouth. I look away.

"Are you looking for someone?" I ask her. There's little to recognise here, these ragged dolls strung up with their lolling heads bagged.

"No. But I want to look at them all. See them."

This is not morbid curiosity. Instead, an act of remembrance. Honouring. She is angry too.

Finally she turns away and we walk. "Are you? Looking for anyone?"

"There's no one." We ask this of each other sometimes, us handmaids. When we can. If the other is brave enough. Friends from before, or made at the Red Centre. Only asking after those who might be other handmaids. There's no point in asking after their men. What would we know? Either way, I have no one to ask news of. And no one asks for me.

"Marianne," she says. "My name is Marianne."

Perhaps she says it because we are here, again, looking at the gravestones with their names and their epitaphs. It is a rare occurrence of the written word, to read the names on the graves. These people might be dead but they have their own names, their own words.

Every day now we take this more circuitous route. I feel her lengthen beside me, straighten. I keep my head down. It has been weeks of nothing since our first walk down here. Now this. Out of the blue, they used to say. The blue meant the sky. Fallen from the sky.

I do not know how to acknowledge this. She has given me a responsibility, or a gift, or a curse, I do not know.

Marianne. I test the shape of it in my mouth. How my lips move around it, my tongue. I spend an hour that night on the etymology, derivatives.

If I tell her my name will she even remember it? If I tell her my name will she do the same?

It takes a week before I tell Marianne my name. She repeats it and I can hear the satisfaction in her voice. I imagine her smiling. I have never seen her smile.

Marianne likes variety. It takes me many more weeks to realise this because I do not. I like routine but this life is more routine than I anticipated.

So we stop at different points each day and she seems to have an unlimited capacity to just stand and look, stand and be. It is I who clears my throat and starts to move. We do not want to get picked up for loitering. We do not want to arouse suspicion by being too long. Though I think I would wait with her as long as she wanted.

Today we have stopped along the row of otherwise empty shopfronts in front of Soul Scrolls. When I saw my first Soul Scrolls I laughed. Before, when we were allowed to laugh. When these things were funny. Before they were deadly.

It's making piety even more of a performance than it already was. Order prayers to be rattled out by machines. Printed and recited and logged by some omniscient deity who really ought to know what a sham it is.

Still, something about the machines churning away is engrossing. There's the low hum of the chatter too. We don't go in, just stand and watch through the window.

All it takes is a shift and a refocusing of my eyes and suddenly there in the reflection is Marianne. She is looking at me. I feel it like a jolt, a kick. We both look away.

We both look back.

It is a hollow and discoloured version of her but it is more of her than I have ever seen. Her lips are parted and I add this to my understanding of her, to the models I can make in my mind of her reactions. As I walk alongside her being unable to see.

"Do you think they know," she says, looking at me in the glass, "how pointless this is?"

"Outsourcing praying has a long history. People left money for their prayers to be said in perpetuity. Salvation for their souls. Hundreds of years ago. No one says those prayers any more."

"Now we have machines."

"Even they will not last forever."

She inclines her head toward me but keeps my eye in the reflection. It is as though we are speaking to one another through another dimension. As though this is not real. "None of this will last forever."

"No." I agree. "It cannot. Though that is little consolation, now."

We might as well have put nooses around our necks. We have damned ourselves. Exposed ourselves. But we have done it together.

As I walk up the path to the house the Commander's Wife is in the garden. I don't know her name, either. It's not that I want to. I don't want to humanise her. More that I hate we are all as our relation to him. I call her Ma'am. He calls her Dear. She calls him the Commander, in front of the household, at least.

She is gardening. Or supervising the gardening, really. A young Guardian rakes and hoes. I could help, I want to say. But then she would have something over me, something of me. I cannot afford to give her that. This is what it does to you. Erodes everything human. Trust, community. We are social creatures. I have never been particularly social. This is not an alternative I ever foresaw.

I trusted Marianne. With my life, essentially. And I didn't even think twice.

Perhaps I was more willing to jump because of tonight. What Marianne had no way of knowing. That tonight is the night of the Ceremony.

I bathe, I eat, I wait. Lucy supervises my bath and brings my meal and ordinarily she acts inconvenienced but tonight she is downright stormy. She has better things to be getting on with.

We all gather in the sitting room to be read to. Like schoolchildren. Naughty schoolchildren at that, being lectured to with Bible verses. What they call the Bible, anyway. I suspect it is not, strictly speaking. The Word of Man has crept evermore into its pages. Layer upon layer of men.

Then just the three of us go upstairs. Into the bedroom I have come to believe is only hers. I don't know what she calls him alone, if she calls him anything. Just Mark? If I am Ofmark maybe he is Justmark. I would not put it past him to feel he has it the worst of us.

The Commander is relatively young. Clean. No peculiar smells. I am thankful for small mercies. The mercies are only small.

I lie between her legs as he looms over me. I close my eyes but I still see it so I open them again. Better to see the reality than whatever my mind can concoct. I pick a spot on the ceiling and think of nothing. Even 'think of nothing' is thinking of something.

We walk very slowly around the old Memorial Hall. "It used to be part of the university," I tell Marianne. I don't know why. Perhaps because I want what comes next.

"Did you go here?"

"Yes. Then I worked in the library." Until we all lost our jobs. Lost everything.

"I'm sorry," she says, because she knows. "It hurts too much to think about books. I can't imagine how it must be for you."

"I still read them. At night." It sounds too foolish. "At least, I imagine I do." I close my eyes and I can read.

"Read me a story," she asks, implores. I close my eyes for a moment, collect myself, and begin.

Next to me she is trembling. I can't remember it all. I make many mistakes.

"It doesn't matter," she tells me. "Thank you."

It takes days to finish, in our snatched minutes down by the river and on the walk to and fro where we might not be heard.

Once the book is read we walk under the willow trees and pause looking over the river.

"What did you do, before?" Before, obviously. I say it anyway.

"I studied art."

"Were you an artist?"

"I can't -" Strangled, she falters.

"I'm sorry." I have raised spectres. It is almost impossible not to.

"Art history, postgrad. I worked some afternoons at the museum. They took the paintings."

"They took the books. They burned them."

In a strained state of sympathy we can only stand together. Be with each other in the pain. Of remembering, of mourning the way things were, the way we were.

"I painted, last night," Marianne tells me. "I thought if you could read then maybe I could paint."

"Was it beautiful?"

"It was so beautiful."

There were books in my apartment that I had not read. That I had bought on a whim or good intention. That one day I might be patient or smart or awake enough to read Gravity's Rainbow. That were still unread when I left that room for the final time, was put in a van, was taken away. The extravagance of leaving books unread. Thinking I had no time for them. Assuming there would be time. That there would be more.

Now I have so much time. And nothing to do with it.

Those books, everything I owned, will have been riffled through and inspected and tossed aside. Books burned. Clothes discarded. I had nothing that was of value to anyone else. But it was all valuable to me. In a way that I could not understand until it was gone. Valuable if only because it was mine.

There are more stories, my own abridged versions. She tells me about her studies, her travels. We talk about our childhoods. Like good, polite conversationalists we stay away from politics, religion. Mostly. We try to. This is a respite, a relief. Occasionally we get to putting the world to rights.

Quiet, often abbreviated conversations. Snatched whenever, wherever we can. Because there is no time to waste I take to preparing remarks in advance. I take to having some of these conversations alone in bed at night.

I hear her laugh. I see her laugh. She can laugh, still. We stand at Soul Scrolls, through the looking glass. She holds her head high when we are off the main roads. I can sneak glances at her. Sometimes she is looking back. I never know what to do, when she is looking back.

We reach the corner where we might take our usual turn to walk along by the river. The scenic route people called it, before. There are scenes I think of that cannot be found here.

"Not today," I say quickly.

There's only the slightest hesitation. She had already begun to turn. "Very well," she replies and we continue on.

The river, the church, the Wall. To stand beside her and talk. I can't. I want to. I have become too used to it, too reliant on it. On her. I might come to expect and hope and want and need. And I cannot bear to.

The next day: "Not today," I say again and she replies, "Very well," and we walk home wordless.

And again the day after: "Not to-"

"Is something wrong?" she asks.

Angry? Concerned? I can't tell from voice alone. I need to see her face, her hands, to know. I need to see her which is why I cannot go to the solitude by the river and feel her expand beside me and not be able to see her.

"No."

We are walking home now. We have missed the opportunity for me to change my mind.

Marianne tries again the next day. Before we get to the turn in the path that leads down to the river.

"Have I done something?"

"No." I think about it for a moment and without any indication I angle myself to take the river path.

Half a step behind me, Marianne turns also. "Thank you," she says and I realise it has been a punishment for her. I withheld from her something she needed. Was I punishing her? Punishing her for being so important, too important.

We walk down the sloping path with its railing. The bushes crowding in. Amongst them are Guardians, clipping and shearing.

The river whispers and I hear Marianne inhale. The sunlight is weak but refracts from the water in flashes that could blind me.

I think of sitting under a tree, a willow by this river, reading, with that dappled light on the page. I do not think of Marianne lying beside me - at least, I do not decide to think of it. It just happens. She is there, in my little dream. Once arrived, she does not leave.

I ought to be able to cultivate a sense of self that is mine, independent of all else. Incorruptible, inviolable. I have never been that person. I have always needed.

Messy and subject to the whims of others I have always needed. Attention, approval, respect, love. A need that has never been satisfied, only crushed me over and over again.

Now I need her. But I will never have her and know this. Knowing this makes it easier. Need without want, without expectation, without hope.

It is only desperation. It could be anyone.

But it isn't. It isn't Lucy, or the Commander, or his wife. It isn't a Guardian, Angel, shopkeeper, Aunt. It wasn't anyone at the Red Centre, any other handmaid I have been paired with. It is only her.

We are shoulder to shoulder looking out over the water.

She turns so that she faces the opposite direction. "Look at me."

I am afraid to, now. I do, though. I can't not. It's too much, too close, it feels invasive but I cannot get enough. I look into her face and see the colour and the detail. I see her breathing, her eyes roaming across my face too. I see her.

"Your eyes," she says and I look away but only for a moment. There is still so much more of her to see.

"What would we do, if life were not like this?"

We stand against the wall of the churchyard. She leans. I haven't seen anyone _lean_ in years.

It is not the sort of game I usually like to play. Life _is_ like this. Why torture myself? But I want to know. I want her to tell me.

Marianne hesitates, because, I think - I like to think - she knows this about me. "Really?" she asks.

"Tell me." I trust she has thought of this. As I have.

"Where would we meet? At your library?"

"At your art show?" We will build this together.

She makes a noise of disbelief.

A rally, a march, a meeting, I think. She must have been there too. But no, I do not want even to pretend resistance was needed. This is not before, this is another time entirely.

She moves past it. "We would go to museums. Listen to music." The tone of her voice is as though she is describing pure decadence.

"Play Scrabble?"

"If you like. You would beat me." I can hear her smiling. "Would you cook for me?"

"What makes you think I can cook?"

She tips her head, remembering. "The way you touch the shopping. Like you care about it."

I had no idea. "We could go for dinner."

"We could go to a movie."

Dinner and a movie. I remember what that used to mean.

We are honing in on something. It draws us together with its own gravity. I don't know which of us will break away first. Except that it won't be me. I don't have the strength.

We will write another story. Of what we could have been.

There is a story where we go to the cinema and to a restaurant and she walks me home and kisses me on the stoop.

There is a story where we have been friends for so long until the night I cook her dinner and sit next to her on the couch and kiss her and she is ready and waiting for me.

I tell myself so many stories. This is one of them.

At our slow pace this is a conversation that goes on over a week. We have removed ourselves entirely and I would worry I am losing my mind. But it is only the heady nonsense of this infatuation. We iron out the details of what even I am not obtuse enough to not recognise as a date.

Each night I play it back in my mind, build on it, imagine what comes next. To start: browsing second-hand bookshops. The movie: we decided on a gentle comedy featuring old people going on holiday and finding love. Dinner: we have picked a restaurant and decided on our perfect dishes.

I try not to dwell on the gaps. I cannot place her in anything other than our handmaid clothes. I have never seen her hair. Dark, I imagine. But how?

When it comes to it we idle slowly along the path by the river and we cannot come to a conclusion. We cannot say goodbye. I do, I can, when I think about this alone. I have no difficulty then. I cannot tell her this. About our goodnight kisses, or not. That sometimes we do not say good night at all and the kisses are just kisses. All night, into the morning.

Nor will she end it. Nor will she just walk away.

At the checkpoint on the way back I fumble for my pass. My groceries are heavy. The Guardian there speaks sharply to me. I was not concentrating. My mind is elsewhere. Marianne takes my basket from me and I am still flustered enough that I don't notice she carries them both all the way back to my gate.

I take the basket from her. Awkward, clumsy. But our clumsiness has a purpose. Our hands meet. Instantly her fingers slip along mine and I grasp at them. Our fingertips grip against one another. We cannot break. We have to break. A single second. It is all that is necessary, to know.

"Tomorrow -" she chokes.

"Yes," I say. Yes, yes, yes.

She has skin, like mine. She is real. Flesh and blood. Fire and brimstone. She has needs, like mine.

Oh, God. She has needs, like mine.

Tomorrow comes, though torturously slow. We do not speak, there is nothing we can say, until the shopping is done and we turn back along the river.

Marianne stands so close and even that nearly undoes me. The simplicity of my desire. Just to stand close to her.

Now that I am I find I cannot speak. I had imagined so many things but they all desert me.

"You are the only thing..." She stops, turns back, holds herself in. Puts her arms around herself, restraining.

"Please." Begging is not beneath me at this point. Please give me something to hold onto.

"Being with you is all I can think about. You are all I see. I paint you. Every night I close my eyes and I paint you."

I have been falling too far and for too long. To come into contact now brings a force too explosive. That would obliterate us both.

But I can fall a little further. I walk away from her, into the churchyard. She follows, I hear her footsteps, I swear I can hear her breath. At a tree I turn, I pull off my headdress, the wings, the blinkers fall away. She is two steps away from me, does the same, keeps walking, and we are together.

We are red. We are the colour of danger, of blood, of passion.

Inordinate hours are dedicated to thinking of this. Where can I snatch just a moment with her, to be close enough to taste her. Put my hands to her face and mouth to her lips.

When we can it is a flurry. A desperate collision. I thrum with anticipation if we approach the narrow footbridge and there is no one else around. Under its arch we can come together for a moment. Behind a tree while the leaves fall.

Clutching and gasping and tearing away. The tearing away part gets harder and harder.

Every day all I think about is to be with her. Even when all we can do is walk next to one another in silence. It has to be enough, so it is.

Winter comes. We put on our thick coats, our gloves, our winter shoes. There is snow, sometimes. One blizzard that keeps everyone indoors for three days.

We talk about the river freezing over, we talk about old holidays. I watch her breath dissipate into the air and I kiss her cold, pink cheeks whenever I can.

In the sitting room while the Commander reads I look at the flowers. Cut flowers, not from the garden. They stand still, open.

Flowers accept all comers. All they think of is the necessity of procreation. They manage to make something beautiful out of it.

Each month I become someone else, something else. I leave myself behind in my room. There is no consolation to be had so I do not make any. Everything stops.

There was a choice. I chose this. Of course, when the other choice is radiation poisoning and certain death in the Colonies it is less of a choice. For most people the choice between death and almost anything is not a choice, it is an instinct. So I console myself. It was an instinct. I am an animal, after all. An ancient, instinctive part of my mind chose this.

That was the trade-off. The Ceremony. Once a month to be raped in a ritual, trying to believe it wasn't real. In return for which: life. Of a sort. Alive, at least. But only on probation. The point of my life is to have a child and if I cannot then I go to the Colonies anyway.

When faced with these choices that feel so abstract you decide things about yourself that then get put to the test. I did not know myself well. Not at all.

There were other trade-offs. I thought I could be alone and I can. I thought I could do without sex and I can. I thought I could do without love and I cannot. I cannot stop myself from falling, even to save my life.

In the kitchen I leave the basket and stand watching Lucy preparing the vegetables. She gives me a sideways glance but says nothing. I lean on the counter for a moment more and then do not dare outstay my welcome. I go back to my room, sit in the window.

To rinse peas. Run my hand through them. A battered old colander, the light coming in through the window, refracting off the water. Her voice. I can hear her voice. She is talking to me. Laughing. I smile, swill with my hand, the light is golden. She is behind me, her hands on my belly, her lips on my neck.

To harvest. The methodical podding. Smooth, to achieve the utmost efficiency, the flow. The thumb sliding along the inside of the pod. The softness. Severing the connection. The satisfaction of the clean break.

To walk among the growing things of my garden. Now, I am the growing thing.

It is confirmed by the doctor at my next medical. The Commander's Wife and Commander are informed. I stare at the floor. He is relieved. She is happy, more than she needs to be as a show, but there are other emotions there too. I expect I will come to know them. We have entered a new stage of our relationship. There is no escape from this.

"You need not go to the shops," Aunt Beatrice says. "You must rest."

The terror of being kept indoors all day almost undoes me to indiscretion, my tongue panicked and loose. I take a breath, think. "The exercise is good."

"Mm," she nods. "True. But not to overexertion. Not if it is too hot or rains or..." and she goes on and on to cover almost every eventuality. I do not care.

Of course, if my contravening this advice were to result in a slip or an illness or anything that endangered the baby I would be entirely culpable and punished. But I remember, before, people did not stop simply because they were pregnant. Not that I paid any attention. I never expected to be here.

Someone will reach into me, I am, after all, only a pod. The part that is to be discarded. They will take what I hold and make it theirs.

The vomiting is prodigious.

"A boy," Lucy says sagely. "More trouble." For who, I want to ask.

I cannot tell Marianne. We are in a race she is unaware of. She speeds through time toward the announcement and I am not sure I am capable of getting there first.

There is nothing to see, not through my robes anyway. My sickness is early in the morning.

The real problem is the mood swings. And the tiredness. An almost lethal combination.

Again I start truncating some of our walks. Days when I am angry. Filled with reckless abandon where I might not be able to contain myself given even a fraction of solitude with her. Days when I am too sad.

She knows but she cannot understand. "What is it?" she asks with such concern.

"It's worse, now that I know you," I say. "My unhappiness was a dead, sad thing. Now it is alive and rages and hurts so much more."

She says nothing.

"I was resigned. You gave me hope." It shoots from me.

There is nothing she can do, we are too public here. "I know," is all she can say. "I'm sorry."

It is dangerous, to want things. To need things. Things that can so easily be taken away. So easily used against your heart and spirit and soul. It is a danger. It is a freedom. It is a rebellion.

I try to remember that even if they take her from me, me from her, they can never take how I feel. How she makes me feel, how I feel about her. That is mine, and hers, ours. We have created this together.

The next day we do go down to the river and I weep against her and she is bewildered and worried and I apologise over and over.

It has been four months. When we are picked up by the vans and taken to a Prayvaganza. We travelled in the same van, Marianne and I. We sat so close. Close enough our hands were hidden in the folds of our skirts as we found one another. And held on. For dear life. Because I knew what was coming.

After the Wives and their daughters have left in their cars, after the Econowives and Marthas have begun the walk home, it is just us handmaids. I know what is coming.

Rows of handmaids kneeling before the little stage where Aunt Janet stands.

"Ofmark?"

Beside me Marianne rustles and I know she wants to look up, react. I want to reach for her, take her hand, I want that reassurance. Neither of us does. We can't. I move along the line and to the front.

Aunt Janet beams at me, she holds her arm out. "Girls," she says to everyone. "We have wonderful news..."

I stand, eyes on the floor. Not modest, not submissive. Afraid.

Whatever she says I do not hear. There is only a roaring in my ears. I do not want to be here, like some prize pig on display. I do not want these women to know what I have done. I do not want them to envy me this. I do not want them to think of me at all.

In the commotion afterward, in the crush of enthusiastic well wishes and bitter congratulations I cannot find Marianne. I cannot be too obvious about looking for her. I don't know if she looks for me but I do not find her.

That night I sleep fitfully. I convince myself Marianne blames me. I have aligned myself with the enemy by doing this.

A searchlight strafes across my window. I don't know in which house Marianne lives. We ought to meet in neutral territory because she knows where I am. She is out there, not too far away. She cannot be far. In a room much like this.

And what is she thinking, of me?

I say I am too sick to go to the market. I contrive to be in the hall upstairs when I know Marianne will come. Watching, furtive, from the window I see Lucy go to the gate, speak with her only briefly. "Not today," she will say. "Sick."

Marianne is small from here. From here I could scoop her up, hold her in my palm, put her into my pocket to be with me always. I watch her, I want her to react, I want her to look for me in the house. That want would damn her. She must stay guarded. I want to know she still cares, even if it exposes her. She does not move, her head stays low, face covered.

When Lucy turns from the gate Marianne turns too. She steps away, back to the sidewalk, turns onto the path. A hesitation. No, I tell her - I defy myself, my earlier desire. No, don't. She does. She looks.

Can she see me here, a blood red smear in the window?

Only for a moment and she walks on, alone.

The next day I know I cannot do the same. There will be concern. Fuss, doctors, intrusion. And I need to see her. I need to be next to her, near her. As I approach the gate she surges forward, just two steps but the speed and the intent is so unusual in us. She clutches the twisting wrought iron and I know it is because she cannot touch me. I dare to look at her. Her emotion she does nothing to staunch. It is not anger. It is relief.

We make our greetings loudly, awkwardly, in front of the Guardians. Once off the street we draw closer together.

"I thought something had happened." The fear in her voice. Tempered, as best she can.

"I thought you would be angry with me," I barely breathe, trusting she can hear me.

"I thought you knew I loved you."

My step falters, my knees weak. I have never been able to believe that. Despite wanting it so badly. Perhaps because of wanting it so badly.

We stand looking across at the Wall.

"It will keep you safe," Marianne says.

"If all goes well."

She sighs. "It will. I can't believe anything else."

We do not talk about what this means. For us.

"I keep almost touching you. Putting my hand to your back. Taking your arm. Holding the door for you."

She is growing protective of me. I swell with her love. It would likely get her killed.

I am large now. Visible. I have never liked to be visible. I am looked at. Sometimes with revulsion, sometimes with jealousy, sometimes with pride. Some people want to touch me, some people want to spit at me, some people just ignore me.

Marianne keeps half a step ahead of me, her head not as low as it should be. In the shops she stands fractionally in front. She tenses. Handmaids have been attacked before. Killed. By others of us, or Wives.

When my baby is born, if it is healthy, if it can be kept, I will be exempt from the Colonies. I will be moved to another house to see if I can repeat my trick but I will never be sent to the Colonies. Marianne is months away from that fate.

If she does not become pregnant that is it for her, she is finished. She will have run through her three chances, her six years. They say cats have nine lives. We have seventy-two chances to create life.

I am standing too close to her because I cannot help it. Her arm is almost around me. I lean into her shoulder. "What if you can't?"

"I can. I have been." She is quiet. We are always quiet. More so. "I had an abortion, before."

If I had the choice, would I keep this baby? Yes, because it is my protection, my ticket to safety. I need a baby to survive. If my life were not staked on its life would I keep it? I don't know. I _don't_ have the choice, my life _is_ staked on it, so I don't know.

"There are good people, still," she says. "There are people who know people and that is how the chain goes." There is a whole world underneath this one that she knows and I do not.

"Where does it go?"

"To Canada."

"Can they get you out?"

"I want you to go."

"No." I turn into her. Hold to the front of her cloak. Always the half-ready excuse in the back of my mind. That I slipped, felt faint. In case anyone sees us. "They should take you. You are almost out of time."

"I have time."

If she had another posting to go then my desire to believe that might have won out. But she doesn't.

"Why would they take me? I'm nothing."

"Because I asked them to. They owe me." She has been up to things. Part of me always knew. The resistance in her. "You need to be ready. I don't know how or when they will come." She kisses my forehead.

She doesn't need to ask if I want this, if I would go.

The visits to the doctor are constant. It's not as though they do anything. There are few tests because there's nothing to be done for a bad test. Mostly I suspect I am being tested. My obedience, my readiness.

This afternoon the van pulls up as usual. A Guardian opens the gate for me and I heave myself in. They do not offer to help and I would not accept it if they did.

I am tired and do not want to do this. I want to be lying on my bed, my feet up. I could not even walk by the river today. Marianne was concerned and I was angry at myself.

Now I sigh and try to stretch out my legs. As I lean back I catch the Guardian's eye. He is looking at me in the mirror. I realise he has no companion of his own, no pair. We are alone.

He holds my gaze. "It's time."

Now. It is happening.

I didn't get to say goodbye. Even now, in these times, with everything so precarious, I assumed there would be a tomorrow. Foolish, arrogant, complacent. Any day could have been our last and now I have the audacity to be surprised.

Take me back, I want to say. No. I do not accept.

I am only afraid.

It's a fear I must live with. There are weeks full of it. They say - my string of benefactors, saviours - that this is quick. It is interminable, waiting, hidden. But quick compared to others. Because I am pregnant. I cannot have the baby here, like this.

I am passed off like a parcel from car to van, basement to attic, from the city into the country and closer and closer to freedom. Until, blinking, confused, I am helped from the compartment in the bed of the truck and stand as best I can, in Canada. Where it is a whirlwind of paperwork and sympathy and kind, gentle midwives. Real clothes. Choosing my own food. A room that I and only I have the key for.

Every day I ask for Marianne. Even when I know it is impossible. The act of looking is more important. That she will hold onto the hope she is being looked for, wanted, needed. It's all I can do for her.

This baby is as much mine as theirs, I tell myself in the days before. There are programs for these few Gilead babies. Everyone would understand if I could not.

The child is small, fair-haired. They put him into my arms as though he isn't a stranger. Neither of us asked for this. It is our bond.

In my arms he isn't theirs at all. He is only mine. And I think Marianne would like to meet him.

There is a midwife and a health visitor and a nurse and a therapist. There are other former handmaids - there is a support group of us. My neighbours. A colleague from the library, from before, who had been looking for me. People from the refugee charities. There are people. People who are friends. I am not on my own. They visit and chat and bring food and shop for me.

No one is surprised that a few weeks after he is born I find myself unable to get out of bed. Only me, berating myself. They keep coming, I keep trying.

He was to save my life. Back there I needed him in order to save my life. Now we are free he needs me to save his life every day. Which, in turn, saves mine.

We explore the city together. We go to cafés and meet people or just sit on our own. Or I sit and he sleeps. Or I sit and he feeds. Cafés mean little to him.

I sit and look out of the window at all this and think how it was here all this time. While I was there, this was here. I look at all these people living their lives while _that_ goes on elsewhere. While Marianne cannot. I live my life while she cannot. She cannot because I am. I am living her life and this forces me back into bed. Only for a day until I understand that if this is her life I have taken then I must live it well.

We are immersed in the day to day past the end of Marianne's term. Her time is up. I ask but no one knows who is coming, who is that far down the chain, who makes decisions. When news comes it is often bad. Arrests made, safe houses discovered, the chain broken.

I ask a lot. I spend so much time at the office I start answering the phone. Stuffing envelopes. Writing letters. He's six months old and there's a creche or he sits on my knee trying to eat anything within reach. I find myself with a job. I am exhausted. It is worthwhile.

He is crying in the night, uncomfortable with teeth, when I get the phone call.

She says my name.

"Marianne," I say back. Holding him and the phone too tight. He squalls.

"Is that -"

"Yes."

She exhales. "You're well?"

"You were right." There's a pause. I am crying too. "Will you come?"

We stand in the doorway holding each other.

She has accommodation arranged, I know the procedure. She never needs it. She comes and she does not leave.

From the darkness. Into the light.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this happened.

When Héloïse leaves they come for me. I knew they would. There is no evidence so they try to beat it out of me instead, which I suppose is where diligence gets you. 

They have suffered the greatest affront: the loss of a national resource, stolen right from under their noses. My delight I keep for when I am alone. Cherish it in the dark trying to wrap my bleeding feet. If they are still looking for clues it means she is still free.

The new Ofmark is small, meek. I want to tell her about her predecessor. How hard she fought to stay true to herself, how uncompromising it is still possible to be, how brave she was. Is.

But she never asks, which is good because I wouldn't be able to contain myself and she is almost certainly here to spy on me, still under suspicion. She will be informing on me to the Eyes. So I am as pious as I can be without retching.

At the house they know of my association. I am watched more carefully. They had their handmaid taken away for a week. Returned hobbling.

Feet propped up on the side of the bath, Elaine dabs at them with a little cream. I flinch.

"I'm sorry, honey," she says.

Elaine is not watched more carefully. Elaine is in her fifties, soft, well-lived. She is invisible to them. She is a linchpin of the resistance for the area. 

"Thank you."

"You've paid a steep enough price."

My feet? Hardly. Giving up my chance to leave? I was so grateful for the chance to give that away. Having to go on without Héloïse? Yes. That is the price. Having to pretend to care about this monstrous world now she is gone.

I go to the Wall with Ofmark. I force myself to care. 

The months wear on. Héloïse would be talking about the weather, the plants, the flowers. Nature unyielding and unconcerned by the mess we are getting ourselves into.

I ask Elaine for news but there is no news, the negative of which is surely, surely a good sign. A pregnant handmaid wrestled back from the jaws of the Resistance? That would be news.

When I ask - I try not to ask too often but I cannot help it - Elaine tuts at me. "Look to yourself," she complains. Hands me the tokens. A note. Passed from house to house and now from me to a shopkeeper. From there? Who knows. 

She doesn't understand how looking to Héloïse is looking to myself. She didn’t understand how I could possibly surrender my escape. Even though I had decided to, months before. It took a little persuading. A pregnant handmaid was a lot more trouble. But also so much more vulnerable. And the baby too. The baby. It must be nearly time and I feel empty, I have never felt so empty. 

There might not be another chance, Elaine had told me. The Resistance works in fits and starts, where and when it can. And two handmaids, who had been paired like that? Suspicious. I understand all this. It was given willingly, sound of body and mind. 

The clock ticks.

I pace in my room. It's the night of the Ceremony. My last. There is no chance I will be impregnated so it's a few more weeks to see if anything has stuck and I'm off. Off to the Colonies. It makes me laugh. I could do anything, now. I am a loose cannon. I wonder if that happens. Handmaids going rogue at the end. Finding something sharp. Taking some revenge. I remind myself to be better than that, better than them. My greatest fear: that I am not.

Lying on the bed with him over me, head turned to the side, her feet kicking at me. They will be glad to be rid of me. Time for a new Ofdaniel. It won't make any difference. No matter how many women come through this house there will be no baby. I wonder if they know that. Or if they still believe, have hopes that will be crushed yet again. I find myself just a little sorry for them.

"Today," Elaine says, pressing my hands. She laughs at the look on my face. Pats my cheek. "I wish you all the luck in the world."

"Thank you," is all I can say. "Thank you." For this chance. For Héloïse's chance. For the chance I might see - but I can't. I'll weep.

The van comes on the street. Ofmark shrieks but she does not object. She will be all right. They won't hold her to account for this. If this is even what it is - a pair of Eyes in their black uniforms bundling me into the back of the truck. 

I still have a knot of fear.

For months I am shuttled back and forth. Two steps forward, one back. A raid somewhere snarls up the line. It must be pieced together again. Painstakingly slowly, carefully. I do what I can, help where I can. Considering I am the reason all these people are at risk

"Her name is Héloïse." I ask for her. "She was a handmaid, she was pregnant?" She was so much more than that.

"Oh, the blonde girl?" someone finally replies.

It shakes me. "Is she?" Then I laugh. I would never have guessed. But knowing she was here... It gives a new reverence to the bed, the chair at the table. She was here. I am following her. Following her where? Did she make it all that way? Will I? 

It happens in the night. A boat over Lake Ontario and with one pull of the oar I go from a wanted criminal handmaid of the Republic of Gilead to a free woman. We continue further, to be out of sight of patrols. A little further to ease our paranoia. Laugh at ourselves, cheer, let loose the adrenaline. 

We are met and welcomed and a hot cup is put in my hands. Caffeine. I used to dream of caffeine. I don't drink it, I can't. I can't hold it without shaking. 

"Marianne. My name is Marianne." I tell them I was a handmaid, I tell them where. 

The man looks at a file. Back at me. "Oh my God."

A woman comes over. "Hi," she smiles, reassuring. 

"It's her," he says. I just stand there, helpless. "It's Héloïse's Marianne."

A step backwards. "Héloïse..."

They both look at me.

"Is she..." I am choking.

"She's fine, she's -" They look at one another. "She's been waiting for you, sweetheart."

There is action behind the scenes as I am put on the phone, the number dialled for me. Her voice. I hear her voice saying my name as I have dreamed of every night. The baby.

In the car I am shaking. A few hours ago I was still on the run. Now I am free. Now I am about to see Héloïse and I am not sure if I ever really believed I would again. Hoped desperately. Wanted more than anything. But now it's here, now I am walking down the hall to her apartment and my new friends squeeze my arm and watch me take the final few steps.

I don't need to knock. The door opens and there she is. 

We've been stood like this maybe five minutes and already it outweighs every touch we managed in all our time together. I start to shake. This is impossible. Perhaps it was never meant to be real. Perhaps she was supposed to be the last spark of life I carried with me to the Colonies. 

Her arms move around me. She kisses my hair. She manoeuvres me inside, to the couch. Now we just look at one another. Her face is wet and I put my hand to her cheek. She trembles. She tells me she loves me, that she is sorry, that she tried. I don't understand except I do, I must, because I say it all back. 

She's holding me and I close my eyes and almost fall asleep on her shoulder. "Let's get you to bed." When I move back and see her looking at me with such concern I am restored. I kiss her, finally. Slowly. So slowly and gently. In all the ways I never could. 

"Sleep," Héloïse says eventually. As I sigh into her, my eyes staying closed too long. "Time for sleep."

It's an effort, to stop, but then an effort to make it into the bedroom. Héloïse is getting me pyjamas when a squall starts up next door. 

"He needs -" She stops herself. 

"Do I get to be introduced properly now?" 

"Do you want to?"

"Yes," I say, desperate that she know it. "Of course I do." 

There's relief, I hate that there's relief. She puts her hand to my face, kisses me. "Get into bed." 

I do and she comes back in with a little grumble about how heavy he is getting. He's pulling at her hair. Doesn't even notice me. His whole world is her.

"This is Adam." She sits, tucks herself into the bed and holds out her arm, draws me into her side. He notices me and his face lights up in a grin. 

"He's beautiful." Bigger than I imagined. I don't really know how babies grow - I don't know anything about babies at all. But he is beautiful and he loves her and I love her and we are allies in this. 

"He has his moments." 

He makes his intentions clear. He has a plan that I am interrupting. 

I curl into her side. She strokes my hair, my cheek, my shoulder and I am asleep. 

My first full day of freedom begins with Héloïse perching nervously on the bed. "What do you want to do?"

I could do anything. Choices. I am unnerved by them. "What did you do?"

She looks blank. "I... I don't remember. It was busy. And I was..." The look that flashes over her face. She was alone. It was different. She gathers herself. "You can stay in bed all day if you like. You can roam the streets. Get drunk. Go to the office and start getting organised if you fancy a day of paperwork."

"Can I be with you?"

Shoulders drop with an exhale. "If that's what you want."

It's what I need. 

There's more that needs to be said. Not today. Today we go to the office and Héloïse is promptly given the day off so we run errands and I watch her, so poised when I feel so rattled by everything. We go to the park and then to her favourite café. Where she feeds Adam and doesn't stop looking at me. It feels like a real life, a real, normal life like the sort I never imagined wanting, before. Before the option of having it was removed. 

Now she cooks dinner and I build blocks into towers for Adam to knock down. This is a favourite game of his, apparently.

Héloïse watches us. "Do you think it's wrong," she says slowly, "to teach him destruction is fun?"

The question, I understand, is really, Am I doing this right?

"You are doing an amazing job," I tell her. And I try to get Adam to build. Which requires considerably more co-ordination than he has, currently, and everything falls down anyway. But we will build. We will teach him. 

When Adam has been wrangled through bathtime and bedtime we lie on the bed together, keeping our voices low. I am exhausted and she holds me to her chest, her hands moving gently, slowly, over my back and arms. Everything feels warm, humming. 

"Thank you for today."

"I'm sorry we mostly ended up doing what I wanted."

"I wanted to. I want -" I've wanted so much, but saying it out loud - with the possibility of it being real - is new, and hard. 

Her hold on me tightens and I'm tempted just to melt into it, melt away, into her. 

"I _don't_ want..." I change tack. "I don't want you to feel you have to look after me, or, worse, that you owe me anything." She's crying already, I can feel it in her breath on my hair. So I prop myself up and look at her. "I don't want to forget." I touch her tears. "I don't want to leave." 

She smiles. "We can talk about it properly tomorrow." Leans up and kisses me. "I don't want you to leave, either." 

And now, finally.

All that time I had known that under her robes somewhere there was a pure form of Héloïse. That I did not know. I could not separate the robes the world had given her from the body she is. And she the same. 

Slowly, now, we find one another. Slowly and gently discovering not just each other but ourselves. What we can and cannot do, what we want, what we need, now we are new people here, together. 

My second day of freedom and I go to the hairdresser. I shave my legs because I wasn't allowed to, then never bother doing so again. Even a stopped clock, and so on. There's official paperwork to be done. Héloïse in her element.

My third day of freedom, I panic. 

I lock myself in the bathroom. Because I can. Because it is a decision I can make and I haven't been able to lock myself in a bathroom for goodness knows how long - seven, eight years maybe. Even though I am locking myself away from where I want to be. Perhaps because of that. 

"I'm here, Marianne," she says at the door. "We can go out, give you some space, whatever you need. But I will always be here." 

"I just..." How can I explain?

"I know," she says and I realise I don't need to.

We go on dates. Dinner and a movie. Just like we talked about. Except, at home, with a baby in the room next door. It's all a bit backward. I don't care. That it is happening at all seems beyond belief. 

Paperwork is concluded and I start working at the office with Héloïse, with the very first people I met when I got here, with Héloïse's friends. My friends, soon. 

We become known in the community. At first, it feels awful. I feel like a fraud, I feel like people are going to laugh at us. Say we barely knew each other, that we pinned too much on each other. 

"That's you," Héloïse says. "That's just you. And I love you."

It fades. Feeling like an imposter in this life. 

The guilt, though, that we made it. That doesn't fade. 

It is not all idyllic. Far from it.

The Great Scrabble Controversy rages. I think Héloïse assumed she would beat me. She does not. There are accusations of cheating and I remain unsure as to how you can cheat at Scrabble but accusations are made nonetheless. The dictionary is wielded like a weapon and I am under constant scrutiny.

"It's your creative way of looking," she says, once I have given her a consolation prize so that she is lying in bed feeling warm and generous. "The way you see every possible combination, all at once." She still won't let me draw my own tiles.

She wins sometimes. For which she also claims a victory prize. 

This is fine by me.

Adam is on my shoulders. Mostly holding on by my hair but I don't mind. He's getting big. I kick through the leaves and Héloïse frets about low hanging branches.

It's blue and crisp and we have a picnic. Héloïse kisses me and Adam rolls around in my lap and I wouldn't have known how to dream of a life like this. 

I hold his hand and walk him up and down on wobbly legs. "Bah!" He calls goodbye to Héloïse.

"Where are we going?" I ask him. He just lurches onward.

That night we are in bed and I've just watched the concentration on her face break open so that she's looking up at me all soft, stars in her eyes. She puts tentative fingers to my face. 

"I want to have a baby with you." Her eyes searching, breath shaking. 

"You do?"

"I want to be pregnant without being afraid and have you there, with me, to see me. I want us to be a family because we choose to be, not because they made us be. I want to know we would have chosen this for ourselves." 

"Yes," I say. "Yes. We'll talk about it properly in the morning. We'll be sensible and rational about it. But yes. I want to haul you out the bath and be sworn at in the delivery room. I want to take them to the park and us all read together. I want to do all that with you." 

I kiss her smile and hold her close. We create a life. 

"How did you keep this from me?" I'm holding her hair and rubbing her back while she leans over the toilet.

She rolls back on her heels and I hand her a glass of water.

"It was the same, as soon as I woke up. Before I saw you." She reaches out to me. "You're here now."

That's the point. That's all that matters. We are here, now.

"Though you might prefer not to be."

"Never," I smile. 

I pull her out of the bath, rub lotion, sing to the gymnast in there. Tap dancing, she moans, in the middle of the night, unable to get comfortable and I rearrange cushions constantly, am rearranged in turn. 

Adam tells everyone we meet that there's a new baby in his mother. With the conviction of only children we have both decided he needs a sibling. Héloïse still shirks from the notice. I still stand a little in front of her. 

"Do you want to know the sex?" the doctor asks.

When it was Adam in there, before we knew it was Adam, I had wanted to know. It had mattered, a lot, back then, back there.

Héloïse looks at me. "No," we say together.

"What have we done?" we also say. At the end of the day, exhausted, still needing to tidy up after one child. Still needing to cook and clean and work.

Then I rub her feet and she kisses me and we are reminded. Of the glory and unlikelihood of this life.

I look at photos of Adam as a newborn. Try to speculate on this one, in waiting. 

"I was told I had a good head of hair as a baby."

There are no photos of us as babies. Or children. Or anything, until last year. There's no one to do the telling, the reminiscing. 

"Is that so? I can't imagine, somehow." She's joking but her hands are in my hair and that's all I need to surge forward.

"No time for this, soon," she mumbles into me.

"Now then. Now." 

The swearing in the delivery room is no joke. I come close to having some bones crushed. 

I've been at a few births. Back there. The ritual. This is entirely different. I am in no way prepared to see Héloïse like this. The raging power of it. The spectacular triumph. 

The way she holds the slippery little thing and I hold her and we say hello, together. To Luke.

It's strange to think that when Adam was doing this - the black shits, the peeling, the constant merry-go-round of feeding and puking and nappies and feeding again and apparently never sleeping, any of us, the fatigue so dizzying you're not sure you are even human - I wasn't here. I was still there.

Héloïse wasn't on her own though and I have a not exactly new-found but much-deepened appreciation of our friends.

We are alert to the possibility - probability, even - of Héloïse 'hitting a bump' as she puts it. We talk about it beforehand. The midwives talk about it, the health visitors. Reassurances that even though things are different this time, so different, no one should feel bad. It's not something that can be willed away. 

Still, nothing prepares me for when it comes. 

I take Adam and Luke out. Give her peace and quiet. She tries to read but when I get back she's no further along and just a mess of frustration and rage at herself.

I lie with her when all she can do is lie in bed. I feed her and them and defend her against her own recriminations and admonishments against herself.

No matter what she says about herself it is better than when she says nothing. Sometimes the despair in her eyes, which is almost a good thing. A glimmer of hope. 

I just tell her I love her. Even when she says I can't possibly, even when she says I must be lying, even when she says nothing. That I love her. We have survived unthinkable things and fought all the way here. She will survive this.

And she does. Comes blinking out into the light, little by little. 

These are the months I had not seen and I try to hold onto every moment. And every month, every week, every day, there are new things to learn. For Luke, learning everything. For me. For Adam. Who is so proud and sweet and says "Good morning!" brightly every time Luke wakes up from a nap, no matter what time of day.

Luke is six months old and mostly sitting up - sometimes sliding, listing, like a drunk. We all sit at the table together and Adam shrieks "Mama!" and I leap across the kitchen to stop Luke pulling the whole tablecloth off. 

"Thank you, sweetheart." I kiss Adam's head, serve him his pasta that decorates his fingers before making its way into his stomach. 

Héloïse dangles him over the sink to wash his hands and zooms him off to read before bed. We swap and I put Adam to bed while she feeds Luke. This is a routine we know well now, though there is always some spanner being thrown into the works. Tonight goes by with little incident. Seven o'clock comes and peace reigns. The kitchen is a bomb site, the living room ankle deep in toys, but this is usual. It's usual and extraordinary.

Soon Héloïse is thinking about the future. Once Luke can eat solids and she can see a future beyond having a baby attached to her almost constantly. 

She fidgets and part of me knows what is coming. "I don't want to go back."

I nod and wait. 

"I can't keep being a former handmaid. I am, I always will be. But not every day. I feel awful about it, but I can't."

Scrambling to reassure her, my arms around her. "I understand."

"I didn't do enough. Then, at the time. Or now."

"What could you do? You survived." The enormity of that achievement hits me square in the chest. She survived. Here she is. Here I am. Here we are, moments later, shedding clothes. Being alive. 

So Héloïse works half a week at a library. She helps with research for the charity sometimes, she still organises the filing, still stuffs envelopes. She thinks she isn't helping, but she is doing more than most. She needs to put a distance and I understand that. 

She worries I don't understand and I worry she doesn't understand that I don't need distance, but that it is no comment on her... and we go round and round on this on several different occasions. There are tears and hugs and I think, well, at least we are more interesting than arguing about who never puts the garbage out. Which is good, because that's me. 

"It's the resistance in you," she says. "I always knew. I always loved you for it." 

There's a delegation that goes to Paris to the United Nations, me along with it. I hate being away from her and the children but I have to do this. There's a creeping terror that something will happen while I am gone. I watch the news obsessively. Waiting for an invasion or a coup that never comes and that is why we are here. To prevent it. To make the world see.

We go to Japan. To show this is not the answer. That we can be better than this. 

Time and time again I have to relate what happened. It gets almost clinical. Never quite entirely clinical. It starts to feel very far away and I can't let it because it's still real for people, right now. I phone Héloïse but I don't cry until I hang up. 

When I get back home they are at the airport to meet me. Luke is waving, haphazard, almost taking Héloïse's eye out. Adam has a sign he's made and is hopping up and down. Héloïse's slips her hand around my neck, pulls me close, kisses me. I scoop up Adam and hold them, all of them. My family. Sometimes this surprises me. Makes me breathless all of a sudden. 

Arms still around each other we make our way out, into the future.


End file.
